Economy, Work, and Education

Critical Connections

Catherine Casey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781136656033
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Economics

Economy, Work and Education: Critical Connections addresses effects of neoliberal capitalism in particular regard to work and education. The book elaborates key aspects and problems of generalized policy models of knowledge-based economies and learning societies in contexts of liberalized firm action, accelerated competitiveness and labor market flexibility. It discusses limits and paradoxes of higher skilled, knowledge-based economies which include significant disparities in labor market absorption of higher level skills, a deterioration of qualitative conditions of work and a re-subordination of workers.

This volume provides a research-intensive crossing of these fields to contribute a closer disciplinary and scholarly dialogue between interested thinkers across fields who too often must labor and converse apart. It offers the vantage point afforded by traversing old boundaries and exploring concerns shared by many scholars and researchers in international circles in pursuit of social and cultural innovation in the governance of work and education and advancing wider social debate

1	Critical reflections on economy and society

INTRODUCTION

The elevation of neo-liberal economic discourse to a predominant place in social life appears now a normative condition, assumed as a fait accompli that defies serious criticism. Social life has accommodated to this economization. People are conforming, remarkably, to the behaviour expected of the economists’ abstraction of homo economicus. More than ever, it seems, they are conducting their lives as rational, calculative and competitive individuals exchanging ever more goods through marketized relations with one another in the pursuit of the maximization of unrelenting self-interest. As well, it would seem, we tolerate with diminishing hesitation the incursion of economic logic into domains once thought of as properly protected from instrumental rationalities and market action. As more and more spheres of social life are brought under the sway of market action, and as individualized economically rational behaviour is widely sanctioned and rewarded, people can assume that particular, contemporary economic patterns and tendencies are self-evidently normative and irrefutable. Moreover, as the welfare state strains precariously under myriad social and economic pressures, many political leaders assume that market action provides an alternative, socially weak form of governance. Commentators and policy-makers can incline to the view that the neo-liberal economic dominance of society is now reasonably to be expected. Yet, of course, despite these powerful tendencies, homo economicus can never reflect the rich complexities of being human. It cannot account for, nor speak of, social and cultural values, motivations and bonds between people nor grasp the mysteries of the affective and interior life of persons.

Much critical concern has been raised in recent decades over the social and cultural consequences of the intensification of economic rationalization under a persistent neo-liberal political climate, which has scarcely altered since the 2008 financial crisis of capitalism. Prominent sociologists, including Pierre Bourdieu (1999) and Alain Touraine (1995, 2001) have railed against the tyranny of the market and the dispersion of society into asocial individualism. For Manuel Castells (1998), a virtually unrestricted market logic of technologically driven “global informational capitalism” forges the segmentation of societies into areas in which many people are structurally excluded from formal economies and globalizing markets and a minority of others are their beneficiaries. For Colin Crouch (2005a), a “resurgent capitalism” and the neo-liberalized recalibration of social relations that has dramatically tipped the balance in favour of capital effect an “entropy of democracy”. We now witness marketized individuals retreat from a public politics that has degenerated into business-dominated demands on a compliant state. For Boltanski and Chiapello (2007), a “new spirit of capitalism” incorporates the emancipatory cultural movements of the post-war generation and directs their energies into capitalist legitimation and renovation.

The social prices wrought from the rapid uptake of neo-classical economics demanded by political and business elites and which legitimated the neo-liberal political turn away from a managed capitalism in the latter years of the twentieth century are immense. Even as a few economists, prominently Keynes (1936), Galbraith (1967) and Polanyi ([1944] 1957), noted in much earlier years that economic forces left to themselves do not work out for the best but rather for the interests of a powerful few, the prevailing political elites of recent decades took a decisive course. In opting for the business-elite demand for greater economic freedom for private action, a path to an economically rationalized and highly marketized social arena, with markedly uneven regulatory relationships and greater social inequalities, was set in place. The state, voluntarily weakened in response to business demands (including those for requirements to bail out the market failures of the corporate firm), has assisted a wide social and cultural accommodation to market economic rationalities that now shape society. Now, political efforts to challenge and mitigate the feral capitalism that neo-liberalism let loose encounter its institutional pathways and cultural accommodation which obstruct efforts for imaginative and widely innovative social action. For some, the prevailing conditions are appropriately described, following Polanyi, as “market society” (Slater and Tonkiss 2001) in which the market economy’s triumph over social and cultural relations appears complete. Still others seek to understand sweeping currents of identity, expressivism, consumption, religious movements and post-materialist values (Beck 1992; Inglehart 1997; Taylor 1989) that interweave with market economic forces but which may variously contest or refuse them.

The spheres of work and education lie in the middle of these currents of market economies and cultural aspirations. It appears that work, most especially, and increasingly education have become ineluctably transfused with market economic rationalities. But the broader contexts in which education and work are embedded have historically been composed of richly varied social and cultural sources. Even as economic features have been prominent in both, they have never been exclusively so even in the world of work. Each of the spheres of work and education is now more than ever affected by particular configurations of capitalist economic imperatives and their institutional conduits, including, according to Boltanski and Chiapello (2007), their sources of cultural critique in the name of emancipation. The critical connections and degrees of autonomy of work and education in regard to economy have altered. That alteration is of profound import for society and citizens. In this introductory chapter I endeavour, from a sociological vantage point, to give an overview of the main currents and confluences of economy and society with particular attention to their contextualization of the spheres of work and education. In endeavouring to understand the political economic context, a clearer light may be cast on the effects and implications of neo-liberal political forces and economic rationalization on work and education. The context of the discussion is the decades at the turn of the twenty-first century.

ECONOMIC REASON AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY CAPITALISM

The decades following World War II set a particular historical context in which subsequent social and economic developments have frequently been reflected and compared. Those decades are characterized by social and political arrangements that may usefully be termed the mid-twentieth century social compromise, or Keynesian settlement, in the European model welfare states. Those decades, often glowingly referred to as “les trente glorieuses” (the “thirty glorious years”) in the words of the French economist Jean Fourastié (1979), achieved in the post-World War II period of industrial growth and working-class advancement an unprecedented social redistribution and relative social cohesion. That period of socially managed capitalism was one in which the forces of capitalism were subject to forms of regulation that included effective roles for non-state socio-cultural institutions and democratic political actors. Institutional forces, as Emile Durkheim proposed, including especially those of the state and of civil society, managed, more or less, to constrain societal conflict and domination by particular powerful sectors, including of markets. That regulatory regime enabled the tensions between a capitalist economy and democratic polity to be recognized and institutionalized. It enabled advances toward forms of, or at least effective argumentation for, worker participation and democratization in the regulation of work and production that assisted the stability of the mid-twentieth century compromise.

The collapse of that regime’s efforts to tame capitalism, through a series of experiences and narratives of crisis, opened the way to the new, or restored, power of elite interests. Those ideological interests, although particular and partisan, have been taken up in social discourse in ways that legitimate those interests as necessary economic and social rationalizations and, moreover, their realization as advancing the realm of freedom and autonomy in society more generally. The cultural promotion of neo-liberalism and competitiveness extends even to wage-workers who are encouraged to seize their market freedoms and be more entrepreneurial and competitive in taking up the exciting opportunities of liberated capitalism. The rise of such a powerful view of economic necessity was fuelled by new complexities and exogenous pressures on the Keynesian settlement that emerged after the 1970s as well as by elite demands for the retraction of managed capitalism. The new dynamic forces exerted intense pressure on political governance institutions and on the Fordist production model and accumulation regime.

Rapid technological advancement, the crisis of Fordist production and the high levels of industrial unemployment experienced in the 1980s and 1990s across most European welfare states unravelled the Keynesian regulatory regime. Economic models and policies that were relatively popular and effective in the latter half of the twentieth century gave way. A sea change in economic regulation occurred. Two main elements can be identified within this climate of heightened complexity and dynamism. These elements overlap and intertwine to the extent that they are often treated as inseparable or their coupling as co-determinant. One of these elements is the immensely influential turn – initially in the Anglophone countries in the 1980s – of neo-classical economics. The neo-classical economic turn intersected with a longer and broader cultural trend toward a cultural liberalization with an individualist character. The neoclassical economic influence was taken up in political and social arenas. It fuelled a wider project of neo-liberalism which may be understood generally as those political forms, institutions and sensibilities that assume the superiority of competitive markets, economic individualist action and minimalist social roles for the state. The other element, which, like the individualist character of neo-liberalism, emerged earlier than the current decades of its momentous impact, is the rise of advanced technologies of production, information and communication.

For many analysts, it has been the technological factor itself that is most momentously significant. The extraordinary growth of the ICT sector through the 1980s and 1990s wrought an immensely disruptive effect on conventional industrial production and jobs (which is discussed in Chapter 2). It led many, prominently Castells (1996), to view the technological expansion as revolutionary, yielding through its disruption and generation a new economy of the future. Many saw the globalizing expanse of production and markets as well as cultural interactions and mobility on a historically unprecedented scale as consequences of the technological acceleration.

Sociological theorizations of a postindustrial society and an information age regard the role of technology and knowledge as powerful transformation factors in socio-economic systems of the latter half of the twentieth century. The sociological account of the technological revolution, as exemplified in Castell’s œuvre (1996, 1998), emphasizes its social effects and patterns. For Castells, we are living through a period of history that is “characterized by the transformation of our ‘material culture’ by the works of a new technological paradigm” (1996: 29). The “core of the transformation we are experiencing in the current revolution refers to technologies of information processing and communication” (ibid.: 31; original emphasis). Informational capitalism denotes a new paradigm and a global economy. Philosophers, too, took up these propositions as self-evident. Jean-François Lyotard’s (1984) influential book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, confirmed the view that knowledge has become the principal force of production. Knowledge in the form of “an informational commodity is indispensible to productive power”.

Economists, while generally more cautious in speaking about grand social patterns and societal change, but wildly confident in their deployment of abstract modelling of macroeconomics, entered the debates initially with critical concerns about the looming economic crisis effected by new production technologies and stalled accumulation. They found broad agreement with Castell’s information age and ICT revolution thesis, and with Lyotard’s commodification of knowledge. Many economic and social analysts agreed that the ICT revolution proposed developments of such magnitude that they indicated that a new paradigm in economy, with unprecedented effect, had emerged. The dynamism and excitement of these developments lent much weight to those voices arguing for the liberalization of constraint on markets and firms. The further development and exploitation of the ICT revolution required, its advocates insisted, a sweeping liberalization of managed capitalism. Governments, one after the other, took up a neo-liberal programme of reform. A “new capitalism” of the twenty-first century of knowledge and information and their market generation (Castells 1996; Sennett 2006) now permeates society and culture.

By the 2000s, promotion of the knowledge-based economy and exploiting its potential had generally become accepted. Robert Reich’s (1991) popularization of the concept in the United States was echoed within the decade by European economists. For economist Dominique Foray, society as a whole is shifting to knowledge-intensive activities. The new knowledge-based economy “represents a qualitative innovation in the organization and conduct of modern economic life” (Foray 2004: x). Foray proposes that far-reaching conceptual and structural transformation of the economic activities of advanced societies has led to a shift to knowledge-intensive activities in which knowledge itself is principally an economic good. The knowledge-based economy characterizes a scenario of “structural transformations of economics”.

Although Castells was careful to point out that all technological revolutions have knowledge development at their core, the predominant economic account emphasizes the pivotal role of new scientific and technological knowledge and higher order skills as the principal sources of economic development. They are, moreover, the core elements of comparative advantage and wealth creation which have come to assume the principal objectives of economic action. The greatly elevated role of knowledge in the production of the new technologies and in their subsequent commercial applications and potential for firm comparative advantage through the latter decades of the twentieth century gained wide policy consensus. The elevation of liberalization and competitiveness accompanying knowledge-rich production expressed a shift in political economy. Instrumental market action and private profit-seeking displaced substantive social ends of a socially embedded economy which saw the management of capitalism as a social necessity. A socially embedded economy included, alongside private profit-making, social institution building, economic distribution, and advancing cultural development toward a good society for the many. This was always a fraught and tense configuration. But relatively strong democratic institutions and participatory disputation constrained and utilized those tensions.

Some analysts in the 1980s saw a “disorganized capitalism” (Lash and Urry 1987) succeeding the organized capitalism of the Fordist-Keynesian regime. Certainly, the new dynamism and institutional breakages portended an end to managed capitalism. But the capitalism unleashed under that neo-liberal re-regulation has not substantively fragmented or dispersed its power. The new capitalism of the early twenty-first century has reconfigured itself to shape a powerful and strategic neo-organization. That neo-organization, as I elaborate in the following chapters, crucially includes heightened systems’ rationalization of production, organization and work in accordance with the commands of accelerated competitiveness, and enabled by advanced information and communication technologies (ICT). Moreover, the dominant policy model of the highly liberal and radically marketized knowledge-based economy extends in reach to discipline or assimilate other domains of social and cultural life – prominently education. That ambitious reach appears as the overarching governance project of the reformed and flexibly re-organized capitalism we currently observe.

In the early years of the technological revolution some writers posited alternative scenarios of the social possibilities enabled by technological advancement. A more emancipatory vision was on the horizon. Some imagined the end of the working class and the tyranny of labour as postindustrial possibilities widened democratic participation and freed people from machine-bound labour and capitalist labour relations (Block 1990; Gorz 1982; Leadbeater 2000). They proposed that freedom from work and economic compulsion would enable greater cultural enrichment – more music, art, leisure and non-economic productivity.

A freer, more egalitarian and harmonious social life and a greener planet with socially tamed technologies were promoted as politically possible (Bahro 1984; Daly 1996; Méda 1995). Within the diversity of views, a general agreement that advanced technological change was revolutionary and socially irrevocable shaped the debates. There were profound political and social choices to be made. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the diversity of views and potential for wide visions of the technological and cultural shifts had been quietened.

Crucially, the definitive elevation of a particular form of knowledge, that of instrumental reason, of technological and scientific knowledge, which had long been criticized by critics of modernity certainly since Weber and Freud, achieved a great boon in the surge of the knowledge-based economy and its political facilitators. The triumph of techno-scientific knowledge inferiorized and marginalized non-economic reason. Capitalism is agnostic. Its liberalization strengthened its demand for concordance in a more general secular scientific reasoning. That proposed a fortuitous assimilation for business elites and a boon to profit-seeking action. The inferiorization of non-scientific knowledge extended to a further eclipse of sources of value and meaning beyond economic and material prosperity. Techno-science and market action converged as a triumphant instrumental reason. It ensured that the only forms of critique that could be marshalled against a neo-liberal knowledge-based economy rested primarily on a contestation of degree of liberalization or constraint, not its surpassing.

Still, some social analysts expressed little enthusiasm for the popular terminology of a knowledge-based economy. A singular “new economy” or a unifying model of a knowledge-based economy – especially one that requires a necessary and expansive liberalization – leading the march to prosperity is suspected of being a convenient political programme with an ideological agenda serving elite interests. Much political science and economic discussion has emphasized the varieties of capitalism. A diversity of institutional configurations in the regulation of economic forces is observed across Western countries and within Europe (Amable 2003; Esping-Andersen 1990; Hall and Soskice 2001). Against narratives of globalizing uniformity, these varieties of capitalist institutions, some propose, may offer sources of new governance practices. As well, cultural factors, which economists often overlook, affect socio-economic diversity (Keating et al. 2003) and may indicate challenges to monolithic economic discourses. For others, the search for a “third way” (Giddens 1998, 2003) has dented the hitherto unchallenged neo-liberal master discourse of the 1980s and 1990s. Nonetheless, that third way proved to be an expression of its neo-liberal parent far more than an effort to recreate political forms of constrained capitalism.

There may be much to offer in an emphasis on varieties of capitalism and a retrieval of elements of national and culturally diverse institutional approaches. Yet that scrutiny of institutional variety has been prone to an under-estimation of the occurrence of significant convergences. A striking uniformity of acceptance of the imperatives of liberal marketization, privileged knowledge-based production and accelerated competitiveness as the predominant forces of economic activity in the current decades is readily observed. For some analysts, the extent of the economic consensus suggests little variety of institutional forms and sources of renewed social governance, but rather a rapid globalization, for ill or good, extending a monolithic liberal and technologically rationalized capitalism across the world (Harvey 2005; Robison 2006; Stiglitz 2002).

A politically won consensus that holds that the turn of economic development is toward techno-scientific production now lends the new economy its description as the “knowledge-based economy”. The knowledge-based economy, confident of its superior scientific episteme, requires an overarching policy model to disseminate its capacities and mobilize populations to its adaptation. That policy model gives synthetic policy expression to sociological theses of grand social changes described as postindustrial and postmodern, and to economic and technological accounts and projections of productivity growth and necessary market liberalization, and to government efforts to maintain sufficient levels of employment and social welfare provision. The elevated importance of both market economy and knowledge facilitates a public acceptance of – or at least compliance with – political economic demands on society and people to respond as required to the new regime of the extensively liberal, highly marketized knowledge-based economy.

The neo-liberal governance models that have facilitated the particular form of the knowledge-based economy modelled in policy discourse have elevated the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Critical reflections on economy and society
• 2 A liberal economy of knowledge
• 3 Work now: The forces of production
• 4 A new economy for education
• 5 Labour markets, organizations and the utility of education
• 6 Critical dilemmas for work, education and workers
• 7 Citizens and society, work and education
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index